Robinson Crusoe on Television¹

1. The author wishes to thank Susanna Mayer for a perceptive and helpful reading of the penultimate draft of this essay.

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Robert Mayer is Professor of English and Director of the Screen Studies Program at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe and the editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen.

Notes

1. The author wishes to thank Susanna Mayer for a perceptive and helpful reading of the penultimate draft of this essay.

2. Lost: The Complete First Season, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2005.

3. Carl Fisher, “The Robinsonade: An Intercultural History of an Idea,” in Approaches to Teaching Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Fisher (New York: MLA, 2005), 130.

4. Tom R. Sullivan cites two other examples from the 1960s: Lost in Space, which premiered in 1965 and focused on the Robinson family after their spaceship crashes (the basis for a feature film released in 1998), and the less well-known, The New People from 1969; see Sullivan, “The Use of a Fictional Formula: The Selkirk Mother Lode,” Journal of Popular Culture 8 (1974–75), 45. IMDB.com also cites Lost Flight (1969) and various revivals of Gilligan's Island from the 1970s as examples of castaway narratives on television.

5. Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray, “Introduction,” and Mary Beth Haralovich and Michael W. Trosset, “‘Expect the Unexpected’: Narrative Pleasure and Uncertainty Due to Chance in Survivor,” both in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, ed. Murray and Ouellette (New York and London: NYU Press, 2004), 3–4, 80. “Dramality” is a term used by the makers of Survivor to explain what they were up to.

6. Ouellette and Murray, “Introduction,” 4; and Haralovich and Trosset, “Expect the Unexpected,” 76. Jane Roscoe points out that the makers of reality television shows like Big Brother understand the programs as a blend of documentary and soap opera; “Big Brother Australia: Performing the ‘Real’ Twenty-Four-Seven,” in The Television Studies Reader, ed. Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 316.

7. Fisher, “The Robinsonade,” 130; see also, J. H. Scholte, “Robinsonades,” Neophilologus 35 (1951), 129–38, and Sullivan, cited above.

8. John Barbaret treats “the Robinsonade” and “castaway narratives” as essentially equivalent terms and so does this essay; see Barbaret, “Messages in a Bottle: A Comparative Formal Approach to Castaway Narratives,” in Approaches to Teaching Robinson Crusoe, ed. Novak and Fisher, 111. The many awards which Lost received or for which it was nominated included an Emmy for best television drama and a Hugo for best science fiction “dramatic presentation”; see <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411008/awards>, March 19, 2008.

9. Mimi White, “Ideological Analysis and Television,” in Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 147, 166.

10. Gilligan's Island: The Complete First Season, Turner Entertainment and Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2004.

11. After the shipwreck that brings him to his island, Defoe's Crusoe reports that he builds a raft “to furnish my self with many things which I foresaw would be very necessary to me”; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Shinagel, (New York: Norton, 1994), 37; Robinson Crusoe will hereafter be cited in the text.

12. Survivor Borneo: The Complete First Season, Survivor Productions and CBS Video, 2004. Unless otherwise noted, remarks by the producers or writers of Survivor are taken from the documentary film, “Survivor: Inside the Phenomenon,” that is part of this DVD box set.

13. Remarks by the makers of Lost are from one of two documentaries, “Welcome to Oahu: The Making of the Pilot” and “The Genesis of Lost,” that are included in that DVD box set.

14. See the discussion of Cast Away in Robert Mayer, “Robinson Crusoe in Hollywood,” in Approaches to Teaching Robinson Crusoe, ed. Novak and Fisher, 170–73.

15. As a game show, Survivor depends on the putative isolation of the contestants in a remote location; the organization of the contestants into two teams or “tribes” that compete with one another until their numbers dwindle to the point where the two tribes merge into one (in the seventh episode); regular challenges, either for rewards (extra food, a night on a yacht) or for immunity (from the possibility of being voted off the show); and regular “Tribal Councils,” at each one of which a single contestant is voted off the island until only one contestant, the “survivor,” remains and thus wins the game.

16. The school is never named on the show itself.

17. For an earlier show that he produced, Eco-Challenge, a show featuring groups racing each other across a variety of watery and terrestrial terrains, Mark Burnett, the producer of Survivor, insisted upon “mixed-gender teams,” and he later refused to meet MTV's demand that one season of Eco-Challenge feature only 18–25 year olds. With Survivor, Burnett similarly prescribed “diverse demographics of age, race, sexuality, and gender”; Haralovich and Trosset, 78.

18. Rose (L. Scott Caldwell) and her husband, Bernard (Sam Anderson) are the oldest survivors on Lost, but they are decidedly secondary characters.

19. Haralovich and Trosset, “Expect the Unexpected,” 79.

20. Richard uses this phrase first, to describe himself, but Sean uses the label much more than Richard.

21. Brunsdon, “Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera,” in Regarding Television, 78; all of the “rituals” identified by Brunsdon are either enacted on the island or recalled in flashbacks that treat the lives of the survivors before the crash.

22. Roscoe, “Big Brother Australia,” 316.

23. For another view of sex on Crusoe's island, see Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 144–48.

24. On religion in contemporary American culture, see Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); on the religious models for Defoe's novel, see George Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965) and J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966).

25. Dirk is voted off at the end of the fifth episode; before him those voted off include the two oldest contestants, BB and Sonja; Ramona, a lawyer and the show's only African American woman; and Stacey, who is described as weak by at least two members of her group.

26. This is very like a scene in Cast Away, when Noland buries the only body from the plane crash that washes ashore on his island, and at the moment when he clearly might pray for the man he is burying, he merely shrugs and declares: “So. That's it.”

27. On Lost, besides the memorial services, there is a single moment in the first season when Rose encourages Charlie, and effectively teaches him how, to pray.

28. In the third episode, for example, the two tribes have to haul a chest that is underwater, and Probst tells the castaways that they need “teamwork” to succeed. The second challenge on that episode requires each group has to work together to save one member in a staged rescue.

29. “Tabula Rasa” is the title of the third episode of the first season, the first episode after the show's two-episode pilot. Eighteenth-century philosophers seem to have been much on the minds of the writers of Lost; in addition to Locke, there are characters named Rousseau and Hume. Kate's last name, moreover, is Austen.

30. The quote is from a title card at the beginning of the film, just before the Fairbanks character announces his desire to “get off on an island … and fight the battle of nature against man with my bare hands”; Dir. A. Edward Sutherland, Mr. Robinson Crusoe (1932). In Crusoe (1988), directed by Caleb Deschanel, a nineteenth-century American slaveholder undergoes a moral education as a result of his being cast away; see Mayer, “Three Cinematic Robinsonades” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen, ed. Mayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 45–48.

31. Mayer, “Crusoe in Hollywood,” 171.

32. The locus classicus for these arguments is the work of Ian Watt, in both his The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957) and his Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

33. A somewhat similar contradiction is to be found in Robinson Crusoe. Defoe's hero has two very different views of his place in the world. On the one hand, he repeatedly leaves England in search of “adventures.” (That word is in the title of both the original novel and its sequel, also published by Defoe in 1719.) On the other hand, Crusoe also sees his twenty-eight years on the island as God's punishment for his failure to heed his father's advice not to leave “the Station wherein God and Nature has plac’d” him (2, 5–6, 141, 239).

34. White, “Ideological Analysis,” 153.

35. Roscoe, “Big Brother Australia,” 318.

36. Kraszewski, “Country Hicks and Urban Cliques: Mediating Race, Reality, and Liberalism on MTV's The Real World,” in Reality TV, ed. Murray and Ouellette, 181, 182.

37. Haralovich and Trosset, “Expect the Unexpected,” 91.